The number and street address or rural mailing address of the patient's residence at the time the reportable tumor was diagnosed. Residential street address should not include PO Boxes. For consolidated records, street address may be based on reported or corrected residential address information.
The address is part of the patient's demographic data and has multiple uses. It can be used to evaluate referral patterns, allows for the analysis of cancer cluster concerns, and supports epidemiological studies that use area-based social measures.
Coding Instructions and Summary of USPS Guidelines.
- This field is intended to store street address information for the patient’s physical, residential address. All efforts should be made to find the patient’s true street address and postal code, including reviewing relevant sources outside the medical record if available. A PO Box mailing address should only be recorded when no other address information is available in the medical record and no other information sources are available.
- If the patient has multiple tumors, address at diagnosis may be different for each tumor.
- Do not update this item if the patient’s residential address changes. Store updated address information in the affiliated current address data items. Only update based on improved information on the residential address at time of diagnosis. For instance, it is appropriate to correct an address during the geocoding or consolidation process.
- Refer to the latest STORE for residency rules.
- Additional address information such as facility, nursing home, name of apartment complex, or a PO Box used for mailing purposes, should be entered in Addr At Dx--Supplementl [2335].
- U.S. addresses should conform to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) Postal Addressing Standards. These standards are referenced in USPS Publication 28, Postal Addressing Standards. The current USPS Pub. 28 may be found and downloaded here: http://pe.usps.gov/cpim/ftp/pubs/Pub28/pub28.pdf.
- The address should be fully spelled out with standardized use of abbreviations and punctuation per USPS postal addressing standards (USPS Pub. 28, available at link above). Mixed case allowed.
- Canadian addresses should conform to the Canada Postal Guide. The current Canadian Postal Address Standards may be found here: https://www.canadapost.ca/tools/pg/manual/PGaddress-e.pdf.
- Punctuation marks should be avoided, except when punctuation is necessary to convey the meaning. Punctuation normally is limited to periods when the period carries meaning (e.g., 39.2 RD), slashes for fractional addresses (e.g., 101 1/2 Main St), and hyphens when the hyphen carries meaning (e.g., 289-01 Montgomery Ave). Use of the pound sign (#) to designate address units should be avoided whenever possible. The preferred notation is as follows: 102 Main St Apt 101. If a pound sign is used, there must be a space between the pound sign and the secondary number (e.g., 425 Flower Blvd # 72).
- Abbreviations should be limited to those recognized by USPS standard abbreviations, these include, but are not limited, to the list below: (A complete list of recognized street abbreviations is provided in Appendix C of USPS Pub. 28 available at link above):
APT | apartment | N | north |
BLDG | building | NE | northeast |
FL | floor | NW | northwest |
STE | suite | S | south |
UNIT | unit | SE | Southeast |
RM | room | SW | southwest |
DEPT | department | E | east |
| | W | west |